Palin and McCain's Offensive Exploitation of the Holocaust
In the debate, Sarah Palin promised that she would never "allow another Holocaust. John Mc Cain has repeatedly said he would not permit "a second Holocaust."
What offensive bull! There is not going to be another Holocaust for a host of reasons including the fact that Israel has 200 nuclear weapons and the 4th strongest army in the world. . (There would have been no first Holocaust if the Jews of Europe had the bomb). Jews are no longer helpless flowers who can be annihilated by some tinpot dictator with a big mouth. That was the whole point of creating Israel. And it is Israel's most significant success. No one can destroy Israel without themselves being destroyed. Using the term Holocaust implies that Jews are still helpless victims who can be led like sheep to the slaughter. We aren't.
Promising to protect us from another Holocaust is like telling African-Americans that there will be "no more slavery" or telling Japanese-Americans that there will be "no more evacuations from the West Coast."
It is offensive and demonstrates both insensitivity and casualness about one of the greatest crimes in the history of humanity. Talk about the Holocaust, if you must, but in the context of preventing genocide wherever it might take place.
One more thing. Stop patronizing us by telling how much you "love" Israel. Save your love for America. If it prospers, so will Israel.
MJ: Amazingly, if I was running for office and said that I "loved" England people might ask if I could fulfill my fiduciary duties to the US. But not with Israel? That just validates your point about the patronizing nature of these comments.
October 3, 2008 12:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
MJ, I agree wholeheartedly....How boring!
October 3, 2008 1:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you so so much for saying this. It was the first thought I had when I head her say this.
October 3, 2008 1:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
I wonder what the people in Israel think when dingbats like McCain and Palin make their Holocaust comments?
PS, to whom it may concern;
I don't love the United States or Israel, I love my family, ONLY my family. Saying you love your country is as shallow as wearing a flag lapel pin to show your patriotism.
October 3, 2008 1:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
hmmmm... i thought she was trying to draw a distinction between mccain's position and... everyone else. that only mccain has been mavericky enough to oppose holocausts. made me think, hey why doesn't anybody else take a stand on this?
stupid.
and like you said: offensive.
October 3, 2008 2:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your point seems to be that no one would commit suicide in order to have another Holocaust. That may be true, but its just a guess. Folks willing to die themselves to kill Jews are all to common.
October 3, 2008 4:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Catering to Joe SixPack I suppose. Except there's a good chance Joe SixPack may be anti semitic. So they score no points at all on "Holocaust Prevention" and just make themselves look dumb and dumber.
Even if it were possible to nuke Israel off the map before Israel had a chance to counter strike, obviously NATO wouldn't sit idly by. The US would have no choice but to nuke Iran off the map in turn. If terrorists were responsible, we'd have a few months of deliberation and then nuke Iran off the map. Anyone with any intellect knows it's just Ahmadinejad engaged in an Islamic personality contest.
October 3, 2008 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
M.J.Rosenberg's words are a voice of sanity amidst a cacaphony of pandering to extremism, ritualized cowardice, herd-behavior and blind fear.
The musical Abdul Abulbul Amir's prior point in the comments above does not really apply. Conceivably, Ahmadinejad might be personally willing to die, AND to kill millions of fellow-Iranians, just for the sake of also killing millions of Israelis. And the risk of that actually being the case is less remote than, say, the risk of civilization being wiped out in our lifetimes by a collision of the earth with a killer asteroid from outer space. But the risk of Ahmadinejad or any other semi-or-fully deranged politician having sole finger on the (future) Iranian nuclear trigger, or of a majority of Iran's ruling clerics -who might one day have a collective finger on such a future trigger- all possessing similar mass-murder-of-their-own-countrymen wishes is much lower than that.
The sheer irresponsibility of making blanket dogmatic statements about America's foreign policy based on such extreme hypotheticals is more than sufficient justification in and of itself for Rosenberg's denunciatory outrage. The Rove Republicans, whom one-time-semi-maverick McCain has all but sold his soul to embrace, are without scruple or shame in their resort to fearmongering, and we need brave outspoken commentators like Rosenberg to speak up, expose and condemn these unacceptable tactics. They don't quite amount to screaming "fire" in a crowded theater, but are unacceptably close. There are hundreds of REAL issues to debate in the 2008 elections: we need not accept of the same sleazy, trickster fearmongering deceit from the same scoundrels that so heavily damaged America's foreign policy in their "cakewalk to Baghdad."
October 4, 2008 6:24 PM | Reply | Permalink